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Marking 50 Years Since Alan Turing's Death
erroneous writes "Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Alan Turing: mathematician, code breaker, and computer pioneer. He was today commemorated in his home city of Manchester, UK." Here are stories at the BBC and at The Register.
However, I find it tragic and apalling that his life had to end the way it did. With the rampant homophobia in the UK at the time (and, some would say, such feeling still exists, albeit now driven underground), he had no choice but to end his life, else he would face a lifetime of torment and living in the shadows. It's really too bad that otherwise great nations do such stupid things and end up killing their greatest minds. Here's to you, Alan. *clink*
From Dailyrotten:
June 7 1954 Despondent over court-ordered estrogen treatments to cure his homosexuality, Alan Turing commits suicide by consuming an apple laced with cyanide. Turing is considered the founder of modern computing, a pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and a crucial member of the team that cracked Germany's Enigma cipher in World War II.
I hate sigs.
Tony Sale's webpage - WW II Codes and Ciphers is well worth a visit also.
[l337_h4x0r] alan d00d r u 4 real?
[aturing@thegreatbeyond.net] Yes.
[l337_h4x0r] u r a b0t.
[aturing@thegreatbeyond.net] Damnit, for the last time, I am not a bot!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Here is another interesting link:
i cians/Turing.html
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathemat
Not only did he (amongst others) crack the German Luftwaffe enigma codes, but those of the German navy, which were far more difficult. His work was pioneering on several fronts. Surely the world is a far better place for his having lived in it.
bash: rtfm: command not found
Here is a link for Alan Turing and his work on ciphering and enigma machines.
Turing test anyone?
404
I think what they ment was without him, Hitler would be drinking tea at No.10, but he did have a pretty big impact.
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Maybe a bit off-topic, but Turing wrote the first chess machine on paper and played a well known player of his age. He always aimed to be a good player, but never quite got the hang of it. Guess we all have our own skills!
I must wander down there some time... that it's of him holding the apple that killed him is rather thought provoking.
However I can find an Alan Turing Road in Guildford but nothing in Manchester as the article implies.
Is it any coincidence that Apple Computers has a logo of an apple with only one bite in it?
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
50 years since Turing's death... 50 hours since Reagan's death...
Coincidence? Well, yeah, probably.
I don't know how it is in more diverse places, but it often seems like I'm the only gay man majoring in Computer Science, and I remember years ago it was such a relief to find that arguably the most recognized name in the field was gay.
Although the nature of his persecution and suicide are unfortunate, I'm somewhat glad of the fact that it's often talked about--things like this and worse are still happening in many parts of the world.
That said, I prefer not to dwell on it. I am merely grateful that I and others have such a man to look up to in a field that so often seems at present to have so little diversity.
Here's to Alan Turing, a Great Man.
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..there's no umlaut in Türing!
At first, they gave (male) homosexuals testosterone. After all, they were "too girly", right? Well shit, that just turned them into raging aggressive horny homosexuals. So, since that didn't work, they thought "what the heck, let's do the opposite". They had no clue, but kept experimenting. Never seemed to cross their minds just to leave the poor guys alone.
Interestingly Rejewski made it first to France (where his work on Enigma continued) and then to Britain. Where his talents were wasted and he was apparently shocked after the war to learn what had gone on at Bletchley. After the war he went back to Poland and worked in a factory.
It seems cryptanalysts often got the short end of the stick, alas.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
...as we know them today. Turing believed that machines could be created that would mimic the processes of the human brain. He acknowledged the difficulty people would have accepting a machine to rival their own intelligence, a problem that still plagues artificial intelligence today.
He likened new technology devices such as cameras and microphones to parts of the human body and his views often landed him in heated debates with other scientists.
Turing believed an intelligent machine could be created by following the blueprints of the human brain. He wrote a paper in 1950 describing what is now known as the Turing Test.
The test consisted of a person asking questions via keyboard to both a person and an intelligent machine. He believed that if computer's answers could not be distinguished from those of the person after a reasonable amount of time, the machine was somewhat intelligent. This test has become a standard measure of the artificial intelligence community.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
Science does not progress equally on all fronts. It goes in fits and spurts. It has been true in the past (perhaps moreso in the past) where the whimsy or intellect of a single person advanced a given field greatly, whereas if they personally were not involved the field might only advance a quarter of what it could, or be completely abandoned in favor of some more "fashionable" discovery. We are constantly finding diaries and notes of inventors and scientists who come accross an astounding discovery but since it isn't related directly to their research they disregard it to be rediscovered maybe 50 or 100 years later. I think it is entirely possible for things like this to happen.
That being said, one of the major drivers FOR information technology was the sheer computation requires to advance in many OTHER fields, so computer science would probably have marched onwards.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
It's too bad we still haven't come far enough, considering a leader of a democratic nation wants to amend the constitution in order to deny rights to the homosexual segment of the population. One has to wonder if President Bush would approve of forcing chemical castration on homosexuals today.
so he was gay. big deal.
For gay men like me, these days, in an increasingly civilised society, its not such a big deal. I can't yet marry a partner and its legal for me to be sacked because I am gay, but its not too bad.
But within my lifetime, it has been a very big deal. Forty years ago, I would have been imprisoned as a criminal. Isn't that a big deal?
For Alan Turing it was such a big deal it lead to his death.
Think of all that we lost; all he could have given us, because in his time it was a big deal.
There are 2 things to consider here I think most people are missing. I'm not saying what happened made it right, but people seem to be lacking context. Frequently, we look back at things and say horrific, but we wouldn't be where we are today if those events in the past hadn't taken place. (I personally find it ridiculous to piss on Thomas Jefferson because he had slaves, Lincoln because he didn't believe blacks could ever be equal to whites, or Columbus for causing genocide simply because he "discovered" the Americas.)
First, in historical context, I believe homosexuality was still considered a mental illness then. Nearly anyone in this time period with a mental disease was treated like trash.
Second, medical practice back then was not as, say, scientific as our approach is today. Treatment and cure experimentation were the focus of the day, not understanding the underlying basis of disease (as noted, homosexuality as considered a mental illness back then).
That said, his so-called treatment fell between medical science as well as societal/legal ramifications.
This is also one of the reasons why it was a huge step to get homosexuality unlisted as a mental disease, something that that vast vast majority in the medical community, conservative or progressive, overwhelmingly agree with. (And also why the scientific and political community has always adjoined and butted heads nearly simultaneously.)
The real story
Even with Turing's method not every message was broken (or even intercepted). When the Germans changed procedures and even the design of Engima (in the case of the 4-rotor Naval version) the Allies often lost the ability to break the codes for weeks or months at a time. Often it was captured codebooks that allowed the codes to be read. Without Turing's work other ways to gain the required intelligence would have been found.
Even if the Allies had of lost the ability to read Enigma-coded messages entirely it is not clear that it would have lost them the war. It's extremely difficult to assess these sorts of scenarios, of course, but don't forget that Enigma intelligence was only one small part of the intelligence available to the Allies.
Most Enigma cracking during the Battle of the Atlantic was based on captured codebooks, up until the start of February 1942. That is when the German navy switched to the 4-rotor Engima. Little progress was made against that until the capture of the new codebooks from U-559 at the end of October. Bletchley wasn't regularly cracking Enigma again until mid-December. So for 10.5 months during the most intense period of the Battle of the Atlantic no Enigma intelligence was available. Cracking Enigma was a big factor in winning the Battle of the Atlantic but it was not the only factor (radar was another for example), and it is not clear that we would have lost the battle without Engima.Turing's 1936 paper "On Computable numbers, with an application to the entsheidungsproblem"
was the seminal work on artificial intelligence and computation. Cellular automata are more an outgrowth of this work. They aren't even that different from Turing machines - they maintain a state and have rules for changing that state depending on their neighbours.
And Wolfram certainly hasn't discovered much that's impressed anyone else working in the physics / computer science world.
:wq
Relgious-based intolerance was the root cause, not homosexuality. There is no problem with homosexuality if you live in a tolerant society, just as there are no problems with being black or a woman if you live in an enlightened society--not that we do, but you get the point.
And by the way, if you think it's on-topic just because it's sort-of, half-way, in part related to the real cause, do you also think it is on-topic for me to point out that G. Dubya Bush was an alcoholic coke fiend who has the IQ of a two-by-four every time there is an article about him anywhere?
Homosexuality didn't cause Turing's death any more than Bush's drug addictions caused him to be perhaps the stupidest elected official of modern times.
You think medical practice is any more scientific today than it was in the 1950s? Now, I'm not saying medical research isn't scientific, because it is (although the studies are often questionable due to the special interest groups funding them). It's just that medical practice is often as much voodoo as it was 50 years ago. Neither is clinical psychology any better. Mental illness is often culturally defined. Here in the U.S. in 2004 it just so happens that it's no longer socially acceptable to believe that homosexuality is a mental illness. Doesn't stop a whole lot of nutter Christian fundies from believing otherwise though.
Again? I wasn't aware that I said a single word about religion, but then again people are reading a lot more into my short post than is actually there.
As for the reasoning behind the government recognition of marriage, there are other benefits of marriage that have nothing to do with children. One would be shared health care costs - while many companies have opened up their health insurance benefits to unmarried couples, it's by no means universal. Another is in the case of life/death decisions if a partner is incapacitated, perhaps brain dead and on life support. In the absence of a living will, a partner - even if the cohabitation had been going on for 20 years or more - doesn't have the same legal status as a wife/husband. Ditto if a person dies without a will, or if a will is contested. Next of kin status is only afforded to married partners and blood relations.
Not to mention that all of your "raising children" arguments break down if homosexuals are permitted to adopt children (and they are).
In short, as long as the government is affording specific legal rights to married partners which are not extended to homosexual partners, the law is discriminatory...and a constitutional amendement, in my possibly ultra-liberal, apparently anti-religious opinion, would be blasphemy.
Why should gays act "normal"? Why is acting normal more important than acting in a manner that makes you feel happy and comfortable? I'm straight but I'm certainly not normal (posting on Slashdot late at night for example). You're probably not totally normal yourself. So what: abnormality is what makes the world interesting.
"In 1990 Hugh Loebner agreed with The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies to underwrite a contest designed to implement the Turing Test. Dr. Loebner pledged a Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's. Each year an annual prize of $2000 and a bronze medal is awarded to the most human computer. The winner of the annual contest is the best entry relative to other entries that year, irrespective of how good it is in an absolute sense."
Further information on the development of the Loebner Prize and the reasons for its existence is available at Loebner's web site.
Note: there is no evidence to indicate that Turing ever worked as an enemy spy, or that the CIA was involved in his death or was even worried about his loyalty. I am only suggesting that, in this case, the CIA would not have been acting out of pure bigotry, but out of a somewhat reasonable fear of exposure.
eikimartinson.com
All of that is related, and ends with saying that they are worthy of death for desiring someone of the same sex or accepting others who do. That's in the New Testament. You'd expect that from the old, since it's generally vile, but the New Testament is rather sneaky with its pervasive evil.
Off your post, to say that Christians have nothing to do with Turing's death is illogical. It's one of many things that I believe Christianity has done to hurt modern society.
And on gay marriage, the law either needs to be changed so that you have to have a kid to get married or you allow everyone to. That simple. Your logic is flawed on that fact, since the Christian church does not allow children out of wedlock.
That's scary.